New Coronavirus 'Eerily' Like SARS

The novel coronavirus outbreak in the Middle East is eerily similar to SARS, according to an expert who was part of a team studying a cluster of cases in hospitals in Saudi Arabia.

"This feels like SARS, it really does," said Trish Perl, MD, of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

"The illness pattern, the incubation period -- there are a lot of eerie similarities," Perl told MedPage Today.

Perl was part of an international team, led by Ziad Memish, MD, of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Mass Gathering Medicine in Riyadh, that looked into a cluster of 23 cases in hospitals in the east of Saudi Arabia.